was the feeling upon her that
her energies felt frozen, and to her it seemed that she was barely
crawling over the ground. There he stood, not fifty yards from her,
fitting a cap upon the pistol he held, and then, every stroke jarring
upon her heart, so distinctly in the strained state of her faculties was
it heard, she could make out that he was tapping the pistol that the
powder might ascend the nipple. But it was all like some horrible
nightmare: she could see every act with almost a clairvoyant power--she
could hear with a fearful distinctness; but she could not shriek--she
could not call to him to desist. It was as though certain of her
faculties were chained, while others were goaded into unnatural
activity.

A few seconds longer, and she felt that she would be too late--that the
dread deed would be accomplished, and she alone with a still, dreadful
corpse--when, panting, half-mad with fear and the horror which gave her
strength, she ran to Norton's side, grasped at his arm, and then her
powers of utterance returned. As she seized his arm he turned upon her
fiercely, dashed her to the ground, and raised his pistol; but in an
instant Ada was again upon her feet, and grasped the fatal weapon, when
there was a bright, blinding flash, a loud report, and then, for Ada
Lee, the present became a blank.

Book 1, Chapter VII.

BALM.

It seemed as though that report awakened Philip Norton from the fit of
mad despair that had prompted him to seek in oblivion the rest he could
not find here--awakened him to the sense that he must be a murderer; for
there, stretched at his feet, her light muslin dress already deeply
stained by the blood flowing from her shoulder, lay the brave girl who
had struggled to his side to suffer, almost with the loss of her own,
for her successful endeavour to save his life. For some minutes, as he
stood there in that dim pine arcade, Philip Norton's brain was giddy; he
felt as though awakening from some horrible dream, and it was only by an
effort that he could recall the present; when, throwing the pistol
aside, he knelt down by the fainting girl, and by means of his
handkerchief succeeded in staunching the blood flowing from a long,
jagged wound torn by the bullet in its passage along her shoulder.

The sight of the wounded girl, as she lay pale and insensible at his
feet, and the knowledge that it was his work, seemed to drive back the
horrible thoughts of self, forcing him into action;